


The Ghost in the Tower

by SimplySyra



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-23
Updated: 2016-11-23
Packaged: 2018-09-01 19:55:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8636041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SimplySyra/pseuds/SimplySyra
Summary: Once, when she was a child, Emily found a strange object of carved bone buried outside her tower.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Refers to the events of the first Dishonored game during which Emily tells Corvo that she's seen a black-eyed "ghost" in the tower.

They are burning the whales. 

As she drifts to sleep, he shows her.

Together they watch the heavy gray heave of their bodies shuddering like trees in the wind. They writhe and buck, the ragged rhythm of their suffering reopening the jagged, bloodied torments of a hundred harpoons. They smell like ash and salt. Like the memory of the acrid smoke that used to waft across from the whaling factories along the harbor.

The touch of his cold fingers against hers. 

Shocking and breathless. Leaves her gasping like a deadly plunge through thin ice into the depths of the winter sea. Her chest cramps reflexively in self-preservation, lungs tightening around her wavering breath as she drowns.  


And suddenly she hears them, too. They are weeping. The sound of it crashing over and through her, filling her mouth with the taste of blood and brine until she chokes on their pain.

She weeps with them.

And he, silent and flickering, watches with her fingers wrapped in his.

~*~

Sometimes she cannot see him at all, and his presence is nothing but a low humming vibration in her bones. Blue and black, ebbing and cresting like a violent tide in her veins until her whole body aches. It is a [hymn too vast and deep for her to contain.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=savCAd6RyPI)

 _Perhaps if I were bigger_ , she thinks, _I could hear it properly._

~*~ 

Most of the time she can see him and wishes she couldn't. Most of the time he is a black-eyed scream torn into the sacred privacy of the space behind her closed eyes. She finds herself, against her will, drawn to the thin white scar that glistens unspoken across the sharp curve of his throat. He opens his mouth and vomits up an ocean of darkness. Something ancient and horrible moves within it. 

~*~ 

One day when she's older, she'll know that there are no such things as ghosts. There are only angry, bitter people who, like all people, eventually die leaving behind nothing but empty dreams and nightmares. 

There are no such things as ghosts, she will think to herself when she's Empress, tossing and turning throughout the night, legs tangling restlessly against smooth silken sheets as Wyman snores gently beside her. 

"There is no such thing," she will whisper into the darkness even as she feels the brush of his lips bruising the back of her hand and the taste of salt and smoke rises at the back of her throat. 


End file.
